Top N.J. highway projects

At $200 million, the Route 35 rebuilding comes out to roughly $16 million a mile. But it’s still far down the list of costly New Jersey highway projects. • Garden State Parkway widening: $1.1 billion. • Pulaski Skyway: $1 billion to rehabilitate the 3.5-mile elevated highway/bridge between Essex and Hudson counties. • I-295/I-76/Route 42 direct connection: $900 million to ease congestion and navigation at the critical highway junction in Camden County, with 10 new bridges and 15,000 feet of sound barriers. • Route 7 Wittpenn Bridge replacement: $480 million to replace bridge over Hackensack River in Jersey City, starting this summer. • Route 52 bridges replacement: $400 million to replace two pairs of high bridges and drawbridges between Ocean City and Somers Point. Completed in 2012, it was the costliest bridge project to date in New Jersey. • Route 72 causeway: $314 million for new bridges linking Long Beach Island to Stafford across Barnegat Bay.

More

ADVERTISEMENT

The rebuilding of Route 35 in Ocean County — the stretch shattered by superstorm Sandy — is on track to cost $16 million a mile, for a total of $200 million, when it’s finished in 2015.

The stunning cost — the single biggest post-Sandy infrastructure rebuilding project in New Jersey — is for more than just a road. Almost the entire public infrastructure of the northern Barnegat peninsula — storm drains, water and sewer and gas lines — was wiped out by Sandy and is being rebuilt.

In some areas, the cost of new stormwater drainage systems exceeds that of laying down the new roadway, according to state highway contract documents. In the biggest section of the project, from Mantoloking south to Ortley Beach, drainage systems account for some 20 percent of that portion’s $100 million contract.

“It’s a completely new drainage system,” said Joe Dee, a spokesman for the state Department of Transportation. “This is much more than just repaving.”

Just over $31 million of the project cost will go for nine stormwater pumping stations, to deal with the highway’s notorious flooding even in moderate storms. To help reduce runoff pollution to troubled Barnegat Bay, engineers built into the design 76 manufactured treatment devices, or MTDs, that strip trash and sediment out of the water before it flows to the bay. Price tag: $6 million.

To keep the bay in its place during high storm tides, the state Department of Transportation took a lesson from Avalon in Cape May County, which years ago began installing one-way check valves on bayside drain pipes to reduce salt water backing up into its streets. Priced from $5,800 to $34,000, scores of the valves and new street end bulkheads are included in the Route 35 contracts.

The new roadway design is massive — 24 inches thick, three times the old concrete-slab roadway, and built in a way to survive the next Sandy, according to the DOT. The project was made necessary when superstorm Sandy shattered the old road into rubble, when the Oct. 29, 2012 storm surge caused the Atlantic Ocean and Barnegat Bay to meet where Route 35 once stood.

(Page 2 of 4)

It’s financed almost entirely by the Federal Highway Administration, which is protecting its investment with an addition — a four-mile-long, $40 million steel sea wall that will be driven into the sand dunes in front of oceanfront houses east of the highway. It’s a last-ditch defense against the next Sandy-sized storm that threatens to break through a new inlet — like the one that engulfed Mantoloking during Sandy — and those that historically have opened and closed there over centuries.

But local officials and residents are growing more concerned that the project — already blamed in part for the hours-long traffic jam last weekend triggered by crowds at the Polar Bear Plunge, a popular charity event in Seaside Heights — won’t be ready in time for spring, or worse yet, the all-important summer tourist season.

“We knew it was going to be bad. We didn’t expect it to be done in two months ... It doesn’t look like it’s going to be done anytime soon,” said Chris Needbling, special assistant to the office of the mayor in Mantoloking, where the DOT has been trying to finish the most critical, narrow stretch of roadway this winter.

Residents have been complaining about the traffic tie-ups caused by the construction, which began in full force after Labor Day. Those complaints reached a peak on Feb. 22, when an estimated 15,000 people descended upon Seaside Heights for the annual Polar Bear Plunge, resulting in some 14-mile backups as residents and visitors tried to snake their way through the Route 35 construction zone.

That experience has heightened concerns about how the two-month backlog in construction work brought on by brutal winter weather will impact traffic as spring — and the all important tourist season — approaches.

With the annual St. Patrick’s parade scheduled in Seaside Heights on Saturday, Ocean County officials are throwing in resources from their sheriff’s and engineering departments to coordinate planning with the DOT to make sure there’s no repeat of last weekend’s jams.

(Page 3 of 4)

“People should give themselves some extra time, but what happened last weekend will not happen again,” said county Freeholder Joseph H. Vicari, who works with the tourism industry and spent days in talks with DOT officials last week. “We’re doing very intensive planning.”

The DOT is working closely with Seaside Heights and police officials to plan for the event, said Joe Dee, an department spokesman. To accommodate traffic, a ramp from Route 37 east onto Route 35 south will be opened to two lanes. It will be evident to motorists so they can get off the highway and use different routes through local streets to approach the parade route on Bay Boulevard, Dee said.

To help traffic flow off the barrier island to the Route 37 bridge, a small section of Hamilton Avenue between Route 35 and Route 37 will be made one way to provide two westbound lanes for bridge traffic, Dee said.

“It will be done in time for the parade,” Dee said. “The (police) chief said he expects far less people than for the Polar Bear Plunge.”

After last year’s depressed tourist season, Ocean County officials were mortified by television news coverage of the traffic jam, complete with high-altitude helicopter camera shots showing miles of stalled cars in the night. “How can people come down and rent houses when they see bumper-to-bumper traffic?” Vicari said. “They won’t come back.”

“The original plan was to start the middle of September and be done (in Mantoloking) by mid-May,” Needbling said. Now borough officials are hearing DOT contractors may need to lay a surface coat on the base of the new highway for summer traffic, and resume work in the fall, he said.

The four-lane, 12.5-mile section of Route 35 cuts through the barrier peninsula, meaning it has the Atlantic Ocean on one side and Barnegat Bay on the other. Route 35 is the only north-south access point to such popular tourist attractions as Island Beach State Park, Seaside Heights and the rest of the barrier island beaches. Construction has reduced traffic to one lane in each direction, and in some sections, just a single lane of traffic for both directions, often resulting in gridlock.

(Page 4 of 4)

Not surprisingly, this section of road sees most of its traffic in the summer tourist season, and the Christie administration made its reconstruction a priority, as key to the region’s economy and a critical storm evacuation route. Studies by the state Division of Travel and Tourism show tourism brings more than $4 billion and 26,000 jobs a year to Ocean County — still about 18 percent of the local workforce.

Municipal officials say it’s a difficult project, and they get cooperation from the DOT on most local concerns. “I’ve gotten responses in less than 24 hours for our residents” when problems come up, said Robert Chankalian, the engineer for Toms River Township.

It’s been mixed in Mantoloking, Needbling said. At times a traffic signal controlling the single lane through the south end of town has failed, making the backups even worse.

“We’ve voiced our objections and concerns to both the DOT and the contractor. Sometimes it gets acted on promptly, and sometimes it doesn’t,” Needbling said. With all of Mantoloking virtually a construction site, “throwing the Route 35 project on top of all that has just crippled us,” he added. “But it has to get done.”

Vicari of the county Board of Freeholders says the project is critical — but so too is the need for state officials to work closer with locals.

“Two hundred million dollars. We love it. Thank you, thank you,” he said. “But they have to listen to local concerns.”